Structural identification based on incomplete measurements with iterative Kalman filter

Structural parameter evaluation and external force estimation are two important parts of structural health monitoring. But the structural parameter identification with limited input information is still a challenging problem. A new simultaneous identification method in time domain is proposed in this study to identify the structural parameters and evaluate the external force. Each sampling point in the time history of external force is taken as the unknowns in force evaluation. To reduce the number of unknowns for force evaluation the time domain measurements are divided into several windows. In each time window the structural excitation is decomposed by orthogonal polynomials The time-variant excitation can be represented approximately by the linear combination of these orthogonal bases. Structural parameters and the coefficients of decomposition are added to the state variable to be identified. The extended Kalman filter (EKF) is augmented and selected as the mathematical tool for the implementation of state variable evaluation. The proposed method is validated numerically with simulation studies of a time-invariant linear structure, a hysteretic nonlinear structure and a time -variant linear shear frame, respectively. Results from the simulation studies indicate that the proposed method is capable of identifying the dynamic load and structural parameters fairly accurately. This method could also identify the time-variant and nonlinear structural parameter even with contaminated incomplete measurement.